Manorbier author Paul Griffiths has completed a hat-trick, once again writing the words for the winner of what is widely considered the top prize in classical music.

This month British composer Christian Mason has won the Grawemeyer Award for Invisible Threads, an original ‘environmental cantata’ for six singers and six instrumentalists. The award was established by American businessman H Charles Grawemeyer with the stated goal of filling gaps left by the Nobel Prizes.

Christian Mason’s music is published by the renowned German firm Breitkopf & Härtel, whose client list included Ludwig van Beethoven.  Mason is the first British composer to achieve this distinction since Edward Elgar.

Invisible Threads evokes the long underground strands that make up most of Earth’s fungi, of which there are hundreds of thousands of species. Paul’s text is made up of strings of similar words that slowly change until they burst out in lines of poetry, as a fungus’s strings of cells suddenly rise above ground in the shape of a mushroom. The twelve performers move as well, changing position and regrouping within the performance space. Audience members are also free to move.

First performed in Germany in 2023, Invisible Threads is not the first collaboration between Christian and Paul. They got their start from the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, which commissioned a choral piece on the condition that Christian set words by Paul. The result, The Singing Tree, has been performed in the UK and Germany.

Christian is currently setting Paul’s text The Oddity Effect, commissioned by the Frankfurt-based Ensemble Modern.

The first to win the Grawemeyer Award using a text of Paul’s was Chinese composer Tan Dun (1998); the second was Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen (2016).

2025 will see a full production of Paul’s theatre piece with American composer Trevor Baça, When The Time Comes.